The Conspiracy Files

Summary

Throughline Episode Summary: "The Conspiracy Files"

Introduction: Unraveling the Roots of Conspiracy Theories

In the Throughline episode titled "The Conspiracy Files", hosts Rund Abdelfattah and Ramtin Arablouei delve deep into the origins and evolution of conspiracy theories, particularly focusing on their surge post-9/11 and their integration with the advent of the internet. The episode explores how skepticism, fueled by real governmental deceptions, morphed into a sprawling conspiracy theory industrial complex that influences public perception and democracy.

Section 1: The Catalyst – September 11, 2001

The episode opens with harrowing personal accounts from individuals directly affected by the 9/11 attacks. Corey Roe, an 18-year-old soldier, recounts the moment he witnessed the World Trade Center towers collapse:

"The reality that we existed in changed on September 11th for everyone on the planet." ([01:57])

These traumatic events sowed seeds of distrust and skepticism towards governmental narratives. Ramtin Arablouei reflects on the heightened awareness of his Muslim American identity post-9/11:

"I was very aware of my identity. That we're different." ([02:47])

Simultaneously, Rund shares observations of his North Jersey Arab American community grappling with fear and confusion, countering sensationalized reports of celebrations:

"They were afraid. They were confused. They had no idea who had done this." ([03:43])

Section 2: The Birth of the Modern Conspiracy Theory

The aftermath of 9/11 saw an explosion of conspiracy theories, amplified by the early internet. Ramtin describes the rise of complex conspiracies that moved mainstream conversations from the fringes:

"The conspiracy theory industrial complex, moving conspiracy theories from the fringes to the mainstream." ([05:48])

Rund discusses the delicate balance between healthy skepticism essential for democracy and excessive doubt that erodes trust:

"Too much skepticism can lead to a world where... we begin to believe everything and nothing." ([06:05])

Section 3: Early Influencers – Bill Cooper and the Rise of Talk Radio

Bill Cooper emerges as a pivotal figure in the 1990s, using talk radio to propagate conspiracy theories. His influential book, Behold a Pale Horse, intertwines various unfounded claims, from government conspiracies with aliens to the origins of AIDS:

"AIDS was created in a lab to wipe out Africa. JFK was assassinated..." ([10:01])

Cooper's radio show, Hour of the Time, becomes a platform for disseminating these theories, tapping into public distrust. His influence peaks until his death in a confrontation with authorities:

"Bill Cooper was called the most dangerous radio host in America." ([20:42])

Section 4: The Digital Revolution – From Bulletin Boards to YouTube

The advent of the internet transformed how conspiracy theories spread. Early bulletin board systems (BBS) like Perinet allowed enthusiasts like Bill Cooper and later Alex Jones to build large followings. Ramtin highlights how these platforms enabled real-time dissemination of unfounded theories:

"Conspiracy theories... with the click of a button." ([14:25])

Alex Jones, inspired by Cooper, leverages the internet to create InfoWars, blending conspiracy content with profitable ventures like dietary supplements and apocalypse gear:

"Apocalypse prep gear, Covert phone... It's profitable to the tune of tens of millions of dollars each year." ([37:39])

Section 5: From Fringe to Mainstream – Influence on Politics and Society

The integration of conspiracy theories into mainstream politics is exemplified by Alex Jones' interactions with Donald Trump. Their alliance during Trump's 2016 campaign helped legitimize conspiratorial thinking in broader political discourse. The emergence of QAnon further exemplifies this trend, leading to significant real-world impacts such as the January 6 Capitol riot:

"QAnon has led to real-world consequences." ([38:57])

Section 6: The COVID-19 Pandemic – A New Era of Misinformation

The COVID-19 pandemic became a fertile ground for conspiracy theories, exacerbated by existing distrust in institutions. Wendy Welch, an author of COVID-19 related conspiracy literature, illustrates how pre-existing skepticism intertwined with pandemic fears:

"Misinformation is spreading fast... It's going to be okay." ([43:10])

Meanwhile, scientists like Alina Chan faced backlash for questioning the lab-leak theory, highlighting the blurred lines between legitimate scientific inquiry and conspiracy endorsement:

"It's better to acknowledge mistakes and learn from them rather than pretend that you're infallible." ([52:44])

Section 7: Confronting the Conspiracy Industrial Complex

The episode also touches on legal victories against outright conspiracies, such as Alex Jones' $1.5 billion lawsuit defeat over the Sandy Hook hoax claims:

"Finally, conceding, the Sandy Hook school shooting did happen." ([53:30])

Corey Roe expresses disillusionment with the pervasive conspiratorial environment, emphasizing a return to personal truths:

"I just try to tune out all the noise." ([39:47])

Conclusion: The Fragile Relationship Between Truth and Society

Throughline concludes by questioning the viability of democracy when truth is compromised. The hosts ponder whether truth remains a cornerstone in an age dominated by conspiracy theories and misinformation:

"Does the actual truth matter anymore? That's a great question." ([40:07])

They underscore the necessity of rebuilding trust and reaffirming the importance of truth to sustain democratic institutions and societal cohesion.

Notable Quotes with Attributions:

• Corey Roe ([01:57]): "The reality that we existed in changed on September 11th for everyone on the planet."

• Rund Abdelfattah ([06:05]): "Too much skepticism can lead to a world where... we begin to believe everything and nothing."

• Bill Cooper ([10:01]): "AIDS was created in a lab to wipe out Africa. JFK was assassinated..."

• Alex Jones ([35:18]): "He really sort of pioneered... getting you to the store..."

• Alina Chan ([52:44]): "It's better to acknowledge mistakes and learn from them rather than pretend that you're infallible."

• Corey Roe ([40:07]): "Does the actual truth matter anymore? That's a great question."

Closing Thoughts:

"The Conspiracy Files" offers a comprehensive exploration of how conspiracy theories have evolved from post-9/11 skepticism into a complex, internet-fueled phenomenon affecting modern society and politics. By intertwining personal narratives, historical events, and the influence of key figures, Throughline paints a nuanced picture of the fragile interplay between truth, trust, and democracy in the contemporary age.

Transcript

[Capital One Representative]

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[Rund Abdelfattah]

September 11, 2001, 9:47am Hi, baby, I'm. Baby, you have to listen to me carefully.

[Unknown Speaker]

I'm on a plane that's been hijacked.

I'm on the plane. I'm calling from the plane. Jules is on an airplane that's been hijacked. I don't know if I'm gonna be okay. I hope to be able to see your face again.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Baby.

[Unknown Speaker]

I just want you to know I absolutely love you. I love you so much. I love you.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Bye.

[Corey Roe]

I remember the day very clearly, as many people do. I was waiting to start basic training. I had gotten my head shaved, I had gotten my, my equipment. And we were just hanging out normal morning, you know, doing pt. It was a beautiful day. And then all of a sudden we just got this call from the drill sergeant. Everybody form up. So everybody fell into formation and they walked us into, you know, the media trailer where there was a TV and it was your old four three square TV with the long extension cord. And then they turned on the tv.

[Unknown Speaker]

I thought it sounded kind of louder that I looked up and all of a sudden it smashed right dead into the center of the World Trade Center.

[Corey Roe]

And we saw the first tower burning. I remember literally less than two minutes that we were watching and then the next tower was hit.

[Unknown Speaker]

And there's more explosions right now.

[Dylan Avery]

Hold on.

[Unknown Speaker]

People are rushing. Hold on just a moment. We've got an explosion inside. The building's exploding right now. You got people running up the street. I don't want to tell you what's going on.

[Corey Roe]

And I remember going for a run because I didn't know what to do. I was. This was not what I signed up for. I did not mean to get into the situation. And I remember collapsing in the woods and I started to cry. Just staring up at the canopy in the woods and just being utterly terrified of what I had gotten myself into as a young 18 year old boy. And now I was deployed into a war that I didn't understand. The reality that we existed in changed on September 11th for everyone on the planet.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Ramtin, what do you remember about 9 11?

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Wow.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

I know. Softball question.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

That's a big question. God, what do I remember? I remember the intensity of it. The feeling of fear not just around the attack and the horror of seeing like the TV coverage. Of the attack, but also just like, what's gonna happen to us? Cause it felt like the kind of country's attention was focused on Muslims. You know, being Muslim American, there was this feeling of uncertainty. And I think for the very first time, I was very aware of my identity. That we're different.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Yeah, like, almost from day one. I don't remember if it was on 911 or like soon after 9 11, but I remember there was this reporting coming out that my community, in particular, this North Jersey Arab American community that was like, right across the water from New York where the twin towers were hit, that people were celebrating in the street.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

I remember those stories.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

I mean, I wasn't seeing any of that. I knew that, you know, in our home or in the mosque or wherever, like, people were talking about how afraid they were. They were. They were confused. They had no idea who had done this. They didn't know why.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

You know, my dad and his friends would be on the couch, like TV was on 24 hours a day. They were just watching the coverage on, like, CNN or whatever and arguing about this country is responsible, that country is responsible. Kind of all the uncle level conspiracy stuff.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Yeah. I distinctly remember, like, my dad being like, you should be suspicious of people in power. Whether we're talking about a cleric or a congress member, they need to be held accountable. And I think a lot of that sort of, I don't know, I guess skepticism. I remember starting to see it make its way online.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Yeah. You know, I went off to college and I was on the Internet all the time, early Internet. And I just remember just the amount of these different, very complex conspiracy theories.

[Unknown Speaker]

None of us knew what was coming on September 12.

What aren't they telling us for in October?

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Especially in the years after 9 11, in 2002, like with the Iraq war, the Patriot Act, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib.

[Unknown Speaker]

What are they telling us that is completely false?

[Ramtin Arablouei]

I think there was a lot of feeling that we weren't getting the whole truth.

[Unknown Speaker]

When you have a situation that is so complicated, you need to turn to fiction to help reason through it.

You seek to make order out of chaos.

Societies around the world have subscribed since time immemorium to conspiracy theories of one sort or another.

There were conspiracy theories in the revolutionary War. There were conspiracy theories in the civil War.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Years ago, in the early days of throughline, we told the story of conspiracy theories before the Internet.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

But 911 and the dot com era helped launch something new. The conspiracy theory industrial complex, moving conspiracy theories from the fringes to the mainstream. And making them profitable. That's what we want to focus on in this episode.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

And here's where things get tricky. Sometimes the conspiracy theory turns out to be true. And some skepticism is key to holding people in power accountable in a democracy. But too much skepticism can lead to a world where, to paraphrase Hannah Arendt, we begin to believe everything and nothing, think that everything is possible and that nothing is true. And if nothing is true, how does a democracy survive? I'm Rund Abdel Fattah.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

And I'm Ramtin Arablouei. Coming up, we're going back to the earliest days of the Internet to trace how we ended up in a world that can't be believed, beginning with UFOs.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

This is Grant Heron from St. George.

[Unknown Speaker]

Louisiana, and you're listening to Throughline on NPR.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Part one. The truth is out there. One summer day in 1947, a rancher near Roswell, New Mexico, came across something strange in the pasture where his sheep grazed. A field of debris he'd never seen before. Tinfoil, rubber strips, and sticks. But he had heard stories of unidentified flying objects, UFOs. There had been a flurry of sightings across the country that summer. People claiming to see flying saucers flash across the sky. Could this be related? The rancher brought a sample to the local sheriff, who was also stumped. Before long, an intelligence officer arrived at the rancher's door. He swept the fields, gathered as much of the debris as he could find, and left, leaving the rancher to wonder, what are they hiding?

[Unknown Speaker]

Look. Up in the sky. It's a bird. It's a plane. What was it they really saw?

[Rund Abdelfattah]

That question started spreading on the airwaves.

[Corey Roe]

Man is not alone.

[Unknown Speaker]

The mind fills it with fantasy. Yesterday's fantasy sometimes turns into tomorrow's reality.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

What happened on that ranch near Roswell in 1947 would fuel conspiracy theories for decades to come. At first, people speculated it was a secret Soviet spacecraft. It was the beginning of the Cold War. But eventually, many people began to see it as ground zero of the alien invasion that the government was covering up. And that last part, the COVID up, was there no matter what version you believed. The idea that some people in power were keeping something from you and me, the powerless.

[Unknown Speaker]

I do not agree with the means by which the powerful few have chosen for us to reach the end. But unless we can wake the people from their sleep, nothing short of civil war will stop the planned outcome.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

This is the voice of Milton William Cooper. Most people knew him as Bill. He's reading from a book he wrote in 1991 called Behold a Pale Horse.

[Unknown Speaker]

We have been taught lies. Reality is not at all what we perceive it to be.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

To this day it is considered a kind of conspiracy theory manifesto. It's actually the number one bestseller in the American prison system and has been cited by everyone from far right militia members to rappers like Wu Tang Clan, Talib Kweli, Nas and Tupac Shakur.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

The book is 500 pages long and there's something in it for everyone. AIDS was created in a lab to wipe out Africa. JFK was assassinated because he was about to reveal that aliens were on the verge of invading Earth. Cooper was a former naval intelligence officer during the Vietnam War. And he claimed without evidence that he.

[Unknown Speaker]

Saw firsthand documents talking about the government conspiracy around crashed alien spacecraft. Majesty 12 is the secret group that is supposed to control extraterrestrial information and projects.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

He casts himself as a whistleblower, a word that had taken on new meaning in American life during the Vietnam War era.

[Corey Roe]

I've earned every cent, but I have never obstructed justice that I welcome this kind of examination. I'm not a crook.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

The 1970s were defined by a series of real life conspiracies brought to light by whistleblowers and journalists. There was Watergate, when the American public learned that President Richard Nixon had repeatedly lied to them about his involvement in a break in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

A report on the US war in Vietnam revealing that four different administrations, Republican and Democratic, had misled the public about their intentions and actions in Vietnam.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

The CIA had attempted to assassinate foreign leaders.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

The FBI had carried out a 15 year operation called COINTELPRO that spied on and tried to sabotage civil rights leaders. And groups like the Black Panther party.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

And the U.S. public Health Service had conducted a four decade study on 600 black men in Alabama intentionally withholding treatment for syphilis without informed consent.

[Unknown Speaker]

Many Americans realize with horror for the first time that presidents would lie to the American people. That the government will lie to the American people.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

This is Garrett Graff.

[Unknown Speaker]

I'm a journalist and historian and author of books on subjects including Watergate and UFOs and 9 11. And I'm the host of a history podcast called Long Shadow. This may be the most startling film you'll ever see.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

All the lies and deceptions of this era led to more people like Bill Cooper becoming more skeptical of the official government story about anything and the rise.

[Unknown Speaker]

Of a paranoid fringe that's trying to understand all of this change.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

I felt something staring at me or a feeling of being watched And I turned around and that's when I saw Bigfoot. For some, conspiracy theories became a kind of outlet to imagine things they couldn't see, to help them deal with the things they could. Films dramatized these fantasies. Things like Bigfoot, the Bermuda Triangle and the big one, UFOs, you know, who.

[Unknown Speaker]

Knows what our universe can hold? Yes. Flick a switch on the modem. Behold.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

By the 1980s, some of these fringe ideas were made, making their way onto the earliest versions of what we now call the Internet. Maybe you remember these kinds of sounds.

[Unknown Speaker]

I'm now waiting for the computer to answer me. There are even greater wonders than we dream.

There were many competing networks. Some of them were defense related, some of them were commercial, some of them were educational.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Most Americans weren't yet online. It was mainly military personnel, academics and businesses. But there was also a small group of computer hackers with their own amateur networks.

[Unknown Speaker]

What becomes the BBS scene or bulletin board system scene?

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Basically early chat rooms where people could type out their thoughts about all sorts of things. Aliens, the supernatural, the sky or the universe really was the limit.

[Unknown Speaker]

What the Internet really is. This is like creative software to project our imaginations to other people, to think beyond one's immediate circumstances, to expose things.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

That had been hidden and to fuel our wildest fears and fantasies in real time with the click of a button.

[Unknown Speaker]

And that of course, is what conspiracy theories, or really any fictional narrative lets us do.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

This is Walter Scheierer.

[Unknown Speaker]

I'm the Dennis O'Dowdy Collegiate professor of Engineering at the University of Notre Dame, and I just wrote a book called A History of Fake Things on the Internet.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Walter says fake things have been on the Internet almost from the start and that some of the most effective fake things are the ones you can't disprove.

[Unknown Speaker]

I think really any good conspiracy has that avenue right where it's like, well, it could be true.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Bill Cooper started to build a name for himself on one of those bulletin boards called Perinet. It was dedicated to all things UFOs. There he pushed the idea that aliens were colluding with secret government forces. Eventually, he gained enough of a following that he was able to take his message to the airwaves with a radio show called the Hour of the Time.

[Unknown Speaker]

In the coming months, and hopefully years, this show is going to bring you information that is not available to the public, ladies and gentlemen, in any form.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

In 1987, something called the Fairness Doctrine, which required broadcasters to feature multiple perspectives on a given topic, was abolished. And suddenly the radio, this old school thing that seemed more and more out of date. Found a new life for conservative talk radio hosts in particular. It became a kind of on air version of online chat rooms and pushed the envelope of what those conversations could be.

[Unknown Speaker]

It's a very angry voice. Bill Cooper becomes one of the most popular and influential nationwide talk radio show hosts in the 1990s. And Nazi means national socialism. It's on the left, not the right. He espouses this. We are in the process of falling into the abyss. Very dark, almost apocalyptic worldview of the looming showdown with the US Government.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Profound and powerful forces are shaking and remaking our world.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

And then, in 1993, a UFO enthusiast was elected president. According to his longtime friend Webster Hubble, one of the first things President Bill Clinton said to him when he was appointed Associate Attorney General was, quote, I want you to find the answers to two questions for me. One, who killed JFK? And two, are there UFOs? An investigation was then opened into the 1947 Roswell incident, declassifying some of the military documents. And it turned out the government had been hiding something.

[Unknown Speaker]

They were developing a secret series of Cold War balloons that would be able to detect, you know, for instance, a nuclear test in the Soviet Union.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

And one of those balloons had crashed in Roswell.

[Unknown Speaker]

The Pentagon just says it wasn't aliens.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

The front page of the report has a diagonal stamp across half the page that says in all caps, case closed. But for many people, it was anything but that, because this just proved that the government had been lying, leading to even more conspiracy theories.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Today, nearly 2/3 of Americans believe there's extraterrestrial life out there. The exciting possibility of a world beyond everything we can see.

[Unknown Speaker]

What I discovered was amazing, But Bill.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Cooper and his listeners saw something much darker.

[Unknown Speaker]

What we would now call in the 2000 and twenties, the deep state.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

The deep state.

[Unknown Speaker]

What I discovered, ladies and gentlemen, is that there has been a plan in existence. The idea of this shadowy cabal of military and intelligence professionals to create an artificial extraterrestrial threat to this earth in order to create a one world totalitarian socialist government.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Then one day, two men drove out to Bill Cooper's Arizona compound. One of those men is believed to.

[Unknown Speaker]

Have been a young Gulf War veteran named Timothy McVeigh.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

McVeigh was an avid listener of Cooper's show. The men asked Cooper if he'd read.

[Unknown Speaker]

The Turner Diaries, which is in many ways the blueprint for the modern white nationalist white power movement.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Cooper had, but he wasn't a fan. Before the men left, they turned to.

[Unknown Speaker]

Cooper and said, Watch Oklahoma City. And then on April 19, 1995, a massive explosion ripped apart the main federal office building in Oklahoma City. Today, at least 20 people are confirmed dead. People were screaming. I was screaming. People were hollering, was anybody okay? Was anybody killed?

[Ramtin Arablouei]

The Oklahoma City bombing is still the deadliest domestic terrorist attack in American history.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

After the bombing, Cooper was called the most dangerous radio host in America, a title he wouldn't hold for much longer.

[Corey Roe]

Hello, caller, you on the air?

[Unknown Speaker]

Yes, Alex.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

How you doing?

[Corey Roe]

Pretty good.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

I was just kind of curious if it's true that the police can have laser or infrared beams and projectiles into your house to. Basically, yeah.

[Unknown Speaker]

The Austin Police Department's in the mid-1990s, there is a young public access host named Alex Jones who is sort of just starting his media career.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Alex Jones grew up in a suburb outside Dallas listening to Bill Cooper's radio show. And Jones eventually switched from public access television to talk radio and began to make a name for himself as a firebrand, which soon led to him getting fired. Alex Jones, who was either Austin's great exposer of truth or a black helicopter conspiracy nut, depending on your worldview, has been canned from his evening talk show, the Austin Chronicle. The station manager said his views were just too hard to sell to advertisers. Jones said the real reason was, quote, purely political. Jones then decided to start his own website. He bought the domain name InfoWars for $9 and began broadcasting from home. If traditional advertisers didn't want him, he would find new ones on the Internet.

[Unknown Speaker]

Mainstream media, government coverups. You want answers? Well, so does he. And now, live from Austin, Texas, Alex Jones.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Coming up, the conspiracy theory industrial complex is born.

[Unknown Speaker]

Hi, this is SOKA from Fairbanks, Alaska, and you're listening to Throughline from npr.

[Capital One Representative]

This message comes from our sponsor, Grainger. This is the story of the 1. As a maintenance engineer, he hears things differently. To the untrained ear, everything on his shop floor might sound fine, but he can hear gears grinding or a belt slipping. So he steps in to fix the problem at hand before it gets out of hand. And he knows Granger's got the right product. He needs to get the job done, which is music to his ears. Call click grainger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.

[Unknown Speaker]

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[Rund Abdelfattah]

Part 2 Truthers.

[Unknown Speaker]

Holy.

What the hell was that? Sounded like a plane crash. America did not know when the 911 attacks began. We didn't know when they were over. We looked up and there was a plane. Next thing you know we heard explosion.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Is just a cold.

[Unknown Speaker]

Everyone is running from the entire financial district now.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

For Most of us 911 was a jumbled mess of confusion and uncertainty. But Alex Jones broadcasting from his home in Austin, Texas was on air claiming to know exactly what happened.

[Unknown Speaker]

They were CIA with double passports and were being protected and they thought they were taking part in a hijacking drill that day.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

You can't find his broadcast from that day anywhere online. But here he is summarizing his thoughts in an interview years later.

[Unknown Speaker]

And then what really happened is they nerve gassed the people on the planes from the best info we have then remote controlled them into the towers. Alex Jones becomes really the first voice of what we now call 911 trutherism.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

911 was an inside job. Don't believe anything the government tells you.

[Unknown Speaker]

Hour by hour you see this split between Bill Cooper and Alex Jones on the radio. Don't report rumors. Don't report anything that comes over your fax machine. Don't report anything that you hear from Alex Jones.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Bill Cooper was no stranger to outlandish conspiracy theories. But Garrett Graff says Cooper always thought he was telling the truth.

[Unknown Speaker]

The only thing that I want to hear about are facts. I think what he saw emerging in Alex Jones was a willingness to lie.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Bill Cooper died just a couple months after 9 11. He was killed in a confrontation with officers at his home.

[Unknown Speaker]

Alex Jones is left as the sort of last conspiracists standing. But it gets worse. What I'm saying, there's thousands of pieces of data. They didn't find one. They found two hijackers, passports unburned.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

In the weeks after 911 we learned that 19 members of the Islamist group Al Qaeda had hijacked four commercial planes. Two hit the towers of the World Trade center in New York City. One hit the Pentagon outside Washington D.C. and the fourth one crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. The attacks killed nearly 3,000 people. The leader of Al Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden was believed to be hiding in Afghanistan.

[Unknown Speaker]

On my orders, the United States military.

[Corey Roe]

Has begun strikes against Al Qaeda terrorist training camps. My local paper did an article on me. Headline is terrorism must be dealt with. Which is a quote from me because that's what I believed.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

A week after completing basic training, Corey Roe was deployed to Afghanistan. And a couple of years into his service, Corey learned he was being redeployed to Iraq.

[Unknown Speaker]

Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

It was 2003. The Bush administration had contemplated an invasion of Iraq since 2001.

[Unknown Speaker]

States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to.

[Corey Roe]

Threaten the peace of the world.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

President Bush consistently connected Iraq to the war on terror, even though there was no clear evidence for Iraq's involvement in 9 11. But the thing that tipped the scales was a claim cited over and over again by Bush administration officials.

[Unknown Speaker]

Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. Weapons of mass destruction. Weapons of mass destruction. Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Many media outlets across the country reported credulously on the administration's claims, most prominently the New York Times. And with their help, the administration sold the invasion to the American people.

[Unknown Speaker]

Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave.

[Corey Roe]

Iraq within 48 hours. We were the tip of the spear. As you know, George W. Bush gave his ultimatums to Saddam Hussein.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Corey served from 2001 to 2005. He witnessed so much death. He told us about an experience he remembers that still haunts him.

[Corey Roe]

She was about six or seven years.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Old, he says a young Iraqi girl was brought to the hospital where his unit was based.

[Corey Roe]

And half of her head had been blown off by a bomb that was dropped from our air force onto what was considered target.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Before long, she died.

[Corey Roe]

And her father came outside and he sat down next to me and he said, why are you here? What are you hoping to do?

[Rund Abdelfattah]

And when he got back home after that tour in 2004, he noticed a lot of people had been asking the Bush administration the same thing.

[Capital One Representative]

Why are you here? Why are you here?

[Corey Roe]

What are you hoping?

[Unknown Speaker]

War is not the will of God. War is never blessed.

[Corey Roe]

So many different things were happening. The families of 911 victims were suing.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

The government, demanding more information about what happened on 9 11.

[Corey Roe]

And the anti war movement was really building. Now Americans were divided. Either you are with us or you.

[Unknown Speaker]

Were with the terrorists.

[Corey Roe]

You were with us or against us. That's what President Bush said.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Corey wasn't really sure where he fit in that with us or against us equation. He was a soldier, yes, but he had serious doubts about the wars he was fighting in. Doubts that intensified after it was revealed that there were no weapons of mass destruction being manufactured in Iraq and that the administration, with help from some in the media, had started a war on false pretenses.

[Corey Roe]

I was mad at the United States government. I was mad at the military. I was mad at myself to be part of this machine that killed. Now that we know over 100,000 innocent people.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

When Corey returned to the front lines, he began expressing these doubts in his letters to his best friend back home, Dylan Avery.

[Dylan Avery]

You know, it's just like a standard envelope that had like red and blue hatch marks around it. So like whenever I go out and check the mailbox, you know, I immediately look and see if I see that red and blue.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

This is Dylan.

[Dylan Avery]

There were times where I would see a newspaper headline and said, three killed in Afghanistan. Helicopter crash. And there were no names. And I would just have to wait and hope that I would get another letter or get an email saying that he was.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

While Corey was deployed, Dylan was spending a lot of time at anti war protests. He'd grown up in a pacifist household where NPR played nonstop.

[Dylan Avery]

There was a poster that we saw at a lot of like the rallies and the get togethers, which was 9 11, truth ends wars.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

And Dylan had access to something Corey didn't.

[Unknown Speaker]

We think the greatest gift of the holidays is Internet. I'd say Internet.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

The rise of the World Wide Web had transformed the Internet into an easy to use network that anyone could navigate.

[Unknown Speaker]

You can have communities of welcome, thousands of people, millions of people, right, Contributing to the narrative.

You've got mail and now you could find them all in your own home any hour of the day.

From a conspiracy perspective, you're always finding new doors to open.

[Dylan Avery]

I was just like, I gotta, I gotta do something.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Dylan began to spend a lot of time in his college library. The Internet there was much faster than his connection at home. Searching for any information he could find about 9 11, he figured he could piece it all together into some kind of movie.

[Dylan Avery]

I was just making this movie, like just to get it out of my system. Like, I was just. I was pissed off.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

When Corey saw the first cut, he got it immediately.

[Corey Roe]

When I watched it, it was just as clear as day of how important this piece was and what he was trying to do with it.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Corey decided to leave the military to work on this documentary with Dylan.

[Corey Roe]

Fact checking wasn't a real thing back there. It was more about what's the best information that we have available today. Let's go with that.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

By 2005, the documentary was ready. They called it Loose Change.

[Corey Roe]

It's a collection of small things that add up to be something greater than their parts.

[Dylan Avery]

9:59, New York City, New York. The South Tower of the World Trade center collapses to the ground in approximately 10 seconds. 29 minutes later, the North Tower follows suit, collapsing in approximately 10 seconds. The building's tenants included the CIA, Department of Defense, IRS.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

It definitely feels like a lot of things mashed up together. You're taken from one claim to the next. Screenshots of declassified government documents and Ground zero footage playing. Though there are elements of truth to some of the claims, many of them have been outright debunked, including the idea that the Twin Towers were brought down by a planned demolition. But their core message fed into a popular idea online, summed up by an early meme, Bush did 9 11.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

In the beginning, Corey and Dylan had mostly just handed out DVD copies of Loose Change. But now they put out a second edition online and it went viral.

[Dylan Avery]

We were number one on Google Video.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

An early streaming service, because what happened.

[Corey Roe]

Was he uploaded it in English and then somebody in South Korea would download it and, and re narrate it or subtitle it in their language and re upload it. And then someone in Germany would do it, someone in Japan would do it.

[Dylan Avery]

We were the lightning strike and it happened at the perfect time where video sharing is starting to take off. People are starting to not trust the war, which, which means that people are starting to not trust the government, which means that people are starting to question what else they've been lied to about.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

There was no advertising model in place for viral videos yet, so they weren't actually making much money off of this.

[Corey Roe]

We needed money, so we took a loan from Alex Jones.

[Dylan Avery]

Alex had such a huge platform and.

[Corey Roe]

We started working on Final Cut, Loose Change.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Final Cut would be an updated version of the original documentary. Alex Jones was an executive producer.

[Corey Roe]

We generally did not understand the danger that he could bring to what we were doing.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

By now it was 2007 and there was a way to make money on the Internet. A new video streaming service called YouTube let anyone post a video online independently. And whether it was a video of a cat or a conspiracy theory, as long as people were watching, advertisers were paying.

[Unknown Speaker]

Alex Jones realizes that there's really good money in these conspiracies. Just type in Pentagon tested gay bomb on Iraq. They considered, no, they didn't consider using it. They've used it on our troops.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

He got involved in more projects. He also got louder.

[Unknown Speaker]

I don't like them putting chemicals in the water that turn the friggin frogs gay.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

For Corey and Dylan, enough was enough. They started taking Final Cut down.

[Corey Roe]

We don't, we don't want it being out there. Because we don't want any association with Alex Jones.

[Dylan Avery]

He didn't have hour in the movement's best interest at heart.

[Corey Roe]

We split up and went in our different directions.

[Dylan Avery]

I mean, it was a bit of a relief. I was tired of just like having to just live inside 911 for so long that, you know, it's like, all right, I don't have to do this anymore.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Meanwhile, Alex Jones was building an empire.

[Unknown Speaker]

As the 2000s unfold. Wherever there's a conspiracy, there's Alex Jones.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Barack Obama runs for president. Jones spreads the theory that he's not a US Citizen. The Great Recession hits. Jones says it was orchestrated by shadowy for forces. A mass shooting at Sandy Hook elementary takes the lives of 20 children between 6 and 7 years old. Jones tells millions of listeners that it's a hoax.

[Unknown Speaker]

They're recycling a green screen behind him.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Above all, he sells the idea that all of this is being engineered by a shadowy deep state. He was speaking to that same feeling of powerlessness and frustration that Bill could Cooper had channeled back in the 90s. The difference was once Jones had your attention, he then tried selling you on all kinds of other things. Dietary supplements from his brand, infowars.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Life, disease, organisms like bacteria and cancer cannot survive in an alkaline environment.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

And apocalypse prep gear, Covert phone and.

[Dylan Avery]

Voice recorders, powerful binoculars, security systems, hidden.

[Unknown Speaker]

Safes, and much more.

The apocalypse for Alex Jones turns out to be really profitable.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Profitable to the tune of tens of millions of dollars each year.

[Unknown Speaker]

I think he really sort of pioneered, like, the whole schtick. He's using the Internet in a very effective way in terms of getting you to the store that a lot of people have then subsequently copied.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

By 2016, the Infowars website had millions of visits per month, and many of Jones disciples were potential voters. Corey remembers when he realized what that meant.

[Corey Roe]

There was a moment in American politics when everything changed, and that was when presidential candidate Donald Trump went on Alex Jones. Infowars and Alex interviewed him. They became friends.

[Unknown Speaker]

Trump becomes sort of the conspiracist in chief.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

And thanks to social media, he was able to share those ideas directly with voters. In 2018, Alex Jones was removed from Twitter now x and all InfoWars content was taken down from YouTube, Apple and Facebook. But not before he helped get the word out about a new conspiracy theory called QAnon.

[Unknown Speaker]

The post began soon after Trump said this in October 2017. Could be calm. Calm before the storm.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

What storm, Mr. President?

[Unknown Speaker]

You'll find out.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

And while it has been widely disproven, Qanon has led to real world consequences.

[Unknown Speaker]

Police say that Welch told them that he showed up at the DC Pizza restaurant to get to the bottom of what appears to be an utterly bogus story about child abuse. Promoted on the Internet on January 6, QAnon's presence in the mob was unmistakable.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

There have been many think pieces drawing a direct line between 9, 11 trutherism, an idea loose change helped popularize, and our current climate of conspiracy. Corey doesn't agree and says traditional news media, who have amplified all these false narratives over the years, are way more to blame. Now, he says he just tries to tune out all the noise.

[Corey Roe]

What I want to do is what I can control, what I know to be true in my own world, raising my family and my girls and my businesses and, and living a life that's important to me on my terms because the world around me is crazy.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

But then, like, where do we go for information? Where do we go for the truth?

[Corey Roe]

You go to yourself because it doesn't ultimately matter what the truth is, right?

[Unknown Speaker]

Does it?

[Corey Roe]

Does the truth matter? That's a great question. Does the actual truth matter anymore?

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Coming up does the truth matter anymore? This is MJ from Detroit, Michigan, and.

[Unknown Speaker]

You'Re listening to Fruit Line.

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[Rund Abdelfattah]

The truth is the Truth the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC has reported the first case in the United States of a new and deadly coronavirus.

[Unknown Speaker]

I remember January 2020, when the first case hit.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

A resident of Washington state in the Seattle area is infected. The man had traveled to central China to the city of Wuhan, where the virus was first discovered.

[Unknown Speaker]

And I remember thinking, please, God, let this be a rich man's disease.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Scientists now say humans can transmit the virus to one another.

[Unknown Speaker]

This is going to be about people who travel through airports for a living and wear suits to meetings. It's going to be over there. It's going to burn the coastlines. It's not going to come to us because we're Appalachia, we're rural, we're away, we're reserved. It's going to be okay.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

This is Wendy Welch, whose books include.

[Unknown Speaker]

COVID 19 Conspiracy Theories and then Masks, Misinformation and Making Do.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

She spoke to us from her home in Wytheville, Virginia.

[Unknown Speaker]

By April, when it was evident that this thing was going to rip through.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

America from San Jose to Salt Lake.

[Unknown Speaker]

To Boston, so called surge tents popping up.

The hospitals in our regions geared up their emergency units ready to catch the patients who were coming with COVID And the patients didn't come. We were sitting in our houses going, literally, the angel of death is passing us over.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Wendy says many people in her community already didn't trust authorities. Appalachia was ground zero of the opioid crisis, A crisis that was manufactured by pharmaceutical companies.

[Unknown Speaker]

One town in rural West Virginia became one of the busiest distribution endpoints for opioids in the country.

It is impossible to overestimate the effects of the OxyContin sellout on medicine. In Appalachia.

Three major distributors of prescription opiates, McKesson, Cardinal Health and Amerisource Bergen, made $17 billion sending 423 million opioid painkillers to West Virginia between 2007 and 2012.

It is the core of conspiracy, conspiracy thinking. To believe that you are part of a group that is marginalized. To believe that you are losing power or never had power in the first place. Also to be part of a group that holds itself slightly apart. If you only understood us better, you would know how awesome we are. Is classic conspiracy breeding ground.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

And into that climate of distrust came Covid. The conspiracy theories started early. Misinformation is spreading fast. There was the one about whether the virus was related to biological weapons research.

[Unknown Speaker]

Was it built in a lab by.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Scientists and unleashed on the masses? Another said that the CDC and Bill Gates were in on it.

[Unknown Speaker]

Do people really believe that stuff.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Alex Jones was selling toothpaste, dietary supplements, creams, and several other products saying they'd kill Covid.

[Unknown Speaker]

Medical conspiracy theory fairly often involves someone who realizes there is, put bluntly, money and power to be made by playing on what people are afraid of or by stoking what angers people. Outrage sells. And then it hit us.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

But by the time Covid hit Wendy's community, the seeds of distrust had already been sown.

[Unknown Speaker]

Those people said, you need this vaccine to keep you and your family safe. And these people said, yeah, that's what you said about oxy.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

As the unknown started stacking up and the conspiracy theories started flying, many people were looking to scientists to lead us through the pandemic. But science wasn't certain, and scientists weren't immune to politics.

[J]

A lot of people know that I made Natural Born Shit stirrer. My stance was, I'm not going to let what politicians say determine what I write. I'm not going to be there calculating the political outcomes of what is scientifically true or not. Like the truth is the truth.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

This is Alina Chan. While Wendy was hunkering down in her home in Appalachia, Alina was doing the same thing in her apartment in Boston, asking herself questions that many of us.

[J]

Were asking then, is this serious? What should we do to protect ourselves and our families? Is it safe enough to go back to work?

[Ramtin Arablouei]

But Alina is a scientist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard who specializes in gene therapy and cell engineering. So she was also asking questions about the virus itself.

[J]

So I started just reading as much as I could about the other closely related coronaviruses like SARS and MERS.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

And she noticed that COVID 19 was behaving differently. It wasn't mutating very quickly, almost like it was already adapted to humans.

[J]

I started to worry that this might have come from a lab.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

And there was another reason she thought this. Wuhan, China, where the first case of COVID was detected, is home to China's premier coronavirus research laboratory. And it was actually scientists from Wuhan who were first sounding the alarm.

[J]

Scientists in Wuhan actually pointed out that it could have come from the markets. But hey, also look at these labs in our city. And they have been collecting these, exactly these types of viruses from these bats, bringing them back to the lab.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

But right away, the Chinese government rejected the idea of a lab leak. And while all this confusion was happening about how bad it was going to get and where it came from and how to stop it, the political rhetoric in the US Was also heating Up.

[Unknown Speaker]

So many of America's elites are so committed to propping up the Chinese Communist. This is the Wuhan Corona virus.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

As the Trump administration and right wing politicians consistently blamed China for the virus, it was leading to real violence against Asian and Asian American communities. In the U.S. meanwhile, U.S. investigators were focused on the theory that the virus had jumped to humans from an animal market.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Top virologists had also stepped into the game.

[Unknown Speaker]

We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Theories suggesting that COVID 19 does not.

[Unknown Speaker]

Have a natural origin.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

This is a letter co signed in the medical journal the Lancet by more than two dozen scientists. Given how politicized Covid was becoming, they felt the need to weigh in with clear information. And they lumped the lab leak theory in with all the other conspiracy theories floating around.

[Dylan Avery]

Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Rumors and prejudice that jeopardize our global.

[Unknown Speaker]

Collaboration in the fight against this virus.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

The letter got a ton of coverage.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

But in private messages around this time, some scientists wondered if a lab leak actually was possible.

[Dylan Avery]

I literally swiveled day by day thinking.

[Unknown Speaker]

It is lab escape or natural.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

We only know about these messages because they were leaked in 2023. The main issue is that accidental escape.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Is in fact highly likely.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

It's not some fringe theory.

[J]

They discussed many concerns in their private messages. One of them was the geopolitical shitshow. Using their words, not mine.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Nobody wanted to be blamed for a virus that was killing millions and millions of people here. We should mention that the US funded and supported projects coming from the Wuhan lab. If the lab was at fault for leaking the virus, the US would also likely have to answer.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

But Alina says she wasn't focused on the politics. She was convinced that a lab leak in Wuhan was plausible and she felt like it was important to investigate all plausible scenarios. So she took what others had said privately and went public.

[J]

There's presently little evidence to definitively support any particular scenario of SARS COV 2 adaptation.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

In a paper which she also tweeted about, she questioned why the virus seemed to be mutating slowly.

[J]

Even the possibility that a non genetically engineered precursor could have adapted to humans while being studied in a laboratory should be considered regardless of how likely or unlikely. So it's that very last statement that got me into a lot of trouble.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Suddenly she was getting hate mail from some people who thought she was spreading a conspiracy theory and from others who didn't think she was taking her theory far enough. And from scientists who thought she was damaging the integrity of science.

[J]

You know, I could have stepped back at any time. I could have completely deleted my online presence and gone into hiding. But I was just like, I'm not ashamed of my scientific analysis. I'm not ashamed of what I wrote because it's true.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Over time, the US Government and science community have come around to the plausibility of a lab leak. In 2021, President Biden asked the US intelligence community to investigate the two leading theories. Again. Today, institutions including the World Health Organization, intelligence agencies, and some media outlets characterized the lab leak as plausible.

[J]

For me, I've gone all the way from in early 2020 being cast as an anti science conspiracy theorist to now a lot of people do see me as some sort of shining example of scientific integrity.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Covid was a crisis and people needed to take rapid action to prevent its spread. Some scientists believed simplifying the narrative was the way to do that, but Alina thinks a show of certainty was the wrong move.

[J]

It's better to acknowledge mistakes and learn from them rather than pretend that you're infallible or to curate it so much the point where you are only saying half truths all the time. So I think sometimes that can be a fatal flaw of a law of public communication to simplify to the point of making something untrue, or to say things so confidently that they fail to convey uncertainty. Sometimes it's refreshing just to hear from experts we don't know yet, but these are the things we're going to do to find out what's happening. Because then in the future, people won't trust you anymore and they won't trust the system, which bodes even more ill for the next crisis.

[Unknown Speaker]

The time to build alliances, the time to build trust, the time to build friendships is before you need them.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

The limits of conspiracy thinking are being challenged today by individuals like Alina and people who have been targets of conspiracy theories like the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims who, after years of fighting Alex Jones in court, finally won nearly $1.5 billion in damages. And maybe more significant, after years of calling the mass shooting a hoax in 2022, Jones admitted that it was, quote, 100% real.

[Unknown Speaker]

Alex Jones stunning admission came during a contentious cross examination.

It's 100% real.

Finally, conceding, the Sandy Hook school shooting did happen.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

We reached out to Alex Jones for comment on this episode, but did not receive a response back.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

This was a moment where the truth broke through all the noise. And yet not all conspiracy thinking is this obvious. But it feels like a big win in a world where we all have to wade through this conspiracy theory, industrial complex and increasingly AI algorithms that fill our feeds, blurring the lines even more. The question is, is the truth enough?

[Unknown Speaker]

The collapse of faith and trust in institutions has so permeated civic life and public life and politics in America today. There's sort of a chunk of the American people who will sort of never believe again the things that they are being told in the media and that American politics in too many ways has become completely unmoored from the basic facts and the sort of small t truths that are necessary for a society to agree upon in order for a democracy to function.

If we give up our belief that truth matters, everything is up for grabs and that has major consequences, in some cases life and death. Who are we if we don't believe that we should tell the truth to each other and we don't hold our leaders accountable for telling the truth to us? Who are we?

[Rund Abdelfattah]

That's it for this week's show. I'm Rund Abdelfattah.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

And I'm Ramtin Arablouei. And you've been listening to Throughline from npr.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

This episode was produced by me and.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Me and Lawrence Wu, Julie K, Anya.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Steinberg, Casey Minor, Christina Kim, Devon Kadayama, Sarah Wyman, Ying Tse, Kiana Pakliwan, Rachel Horowitz, Lena Muhammad, Irene Noguchi. Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Voelkel.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

This episode was mixed by Robert Rodriguez.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Thank you to Johannes Durgi, Shannon Bond, Brett Neely, Tony Cavan, Barclay Walsh, Albert Jung and Puneet Matiwala.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

And special thanks to Casey Minor, Devin Katayama, Ali Katayama and Anya Steinberg for their voiceover work.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric, which.

[Unknown Speaker]

Includes Anya Mizani, Navid, Marvy, Show, Fujiwara.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, write [e-mail] thanks for listening.

[Unknown Speaker]

This message comes from NPR sponsor Shopify, the global commerce platform that helps you sell and show up exactly the way you want to customize your online store to your style. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shop shopify.com NPR this message comes from Bolin Branch. Bonch's best sale of the year is right now. Try the organic cotton sheets loved by millions. Go to bolinbranch.com and use code NPR for 25% off everything. Limited time only exclusions apply. See site for details.